Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Election results

In the nation's most watched race, the New York Twenty-Third Congressional, Democrat Bill Owens defeated Conservative Doug Hoffman who was endorsed by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, the Club for Growth, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Tim Pawlenty and much of the GOP leadership albeit belatedly. But in their rush to purify the Republican party, they also succeeded in driving moderates away. In the end, they not only drove Dede Scozzafava, the local GOP candidate, from the race but into the arms of Bill Owens, whom she endorsed. And no doubt, to capture a House seat that had been held by the GOP since the Civil War era is historic.

The battle for the NY-23 had been billed as one for the GOP's soul. Tea Party conservatives see themselves as the base of the GOP when really they are just a fringe, and a lunatic fringe at that. But what matters in this case is their own perception of the situation. They are, I think, only more embolden[ed] to take on the GOP establishment who is frankly spineless, cowering in fear and out of ideas anyway. I suspect that the battle of the GOP's soul will continue. Still whoever wins that contest wins a shell of a prize. As an aside, the Crist versus Rubio contest down in Florida for the US Senate seat now looks [as though] it will provide much fodder for the press and entertainment for us. . . .

And all that the Right Wing has going for it is anti-gay, anti-abortion values (while they have illicit gay sex in airport bathrooms and murder abortion-providers).

While I would not be inclined to vote for him, I have no antipathy toward Charlie Crist. He seems to be a reasonable person. But reasonableness is not operative nowadays, at least in some quarters.

If Crist is gay or bi (as rumored, though by some reports substantiated), he should come to terms with it vis-a-vis his political affiliation (or vice-versa). I don't vote for people who appear to be dishonest or confused about themselves (I've been there) -- and the GOP is for all intents and purposes anti-gay, although we are meant to somehow put all that aside and suffer Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter.

The RedStaters and their fellow travelers were furious when John Cornyn’s NRSC backed Charlie Crist in the 2010 Senate race in Florida. Why? Because Crist, who’s still popular in a state that Obama won in 2008, had the gall to support TARP and the stimulus and maybe has teh gay.

The Club for Growth/Teabagger approved candidate is the right-wing Marco Rubio, who gets a boost from George Will today.

A Catholic and father of four, Rubio, whose parents fled Cuba in 1959, says, "It is hard to be apolitical when you are raised by exiles." He worries that his children’s generation "will be the first to inherit a diminished country." His preventive medicine includes limited government, tax reform, spending restraint, and removal of all impediments to the entrepreneurship that makes America a place "where poor people can put billionaires out of business."

Bet Rubio can’t name a single billionaire who has been put out of business by poor people.

Rubio is 38. Republicans have occupied the White House for 26 of those 38 years — all insisting that small government and low taxes are the answer to everything.

He’s right to worry about his children’s future, but their future has been jeopardized by the failed economic policies of the Republican Party — not the unwashed masses that Rubio’s shamelessly scapegoating.